Hello, survivors! The team here has been hard at work since our last free update in January, and we now want to share with you what’s coming next.
We are working on our third free update that will add new ways to play our game and bring you some of the most requested features and improvements.
We’ll share all the details once the update is closer to release (very soon) but here’s what you can expect:
Eternal Winter Scenario: survive a permanent winter.
Cold Rush Scenario: your colony starts in the middle of the map, in harsh winter conditions. You have to explore old abandoned structures, gather resources and find a way to escape before running out of time.
Custom Game: new starting conditions (birth rate, terrain flatness, lakes, number of available specialists, and more).
Map Seed Selection: now you can choose the map seed to play your favorite maps (or the community's favorite maps) again and again.
Statistics Overview Improvement: an overhaul to the statistics overview page.
Logistics Improvements: new ways to manually manage and prioritize resources between storages.
Dev Diary - Free Update #2
Happy Year of the Tiger, survivors!
We’re continuing our free 2022 updates with a celebration of the Lunar New Year. This includes new cosmetic buildings along with a new system, which allows you to change how your colony looks like in a flash! It’s not all tigers and fireworks, though, as we’re including quality-of-life improvements to colony combat, how people choose where they live and more.
Buildings with and without Lunar New Year pack enabled
The Lunar New Year content pack includes a banner stand to display your colony flag (also available as a non-themed version), a tiger flag symbol, a red Double Lantern, a mighty Scrap Tiger statue and a cute Waving Cat statue for you to build. Regular torches and lamps are replaced with Lunar-themed versions for the duration of the event. You might also spot some of the colonists wearing festive hats. And last but not least, the Fireworks Launcher allows you to light up the sky in red and gold to kick off the celebrations! You can unlock all the new decorative buildings in two parts by completing colony milestones for prestige. We’d very much like to see how your colonies are transformed, so maybe post a screenshot here?
Lunar decorations can be toggled on or off at any time from the main menu banner, or from Settings -> General. The event ends at the end of February, but you can restore the Lunar theme via the Settings menu after that date. Please note that you must enable or disable the content pack BEFORE loading a saved game or starting a new one.
New unit highlights in combat
In addition to the more cosmetic aspects of the game, we’ve added several quality-of-life improvements for colony combat. All units that are engaged in combat have color-coded outlines, so you can spot bandits running and rat beetles scurrying around much easier. Guard and specialist hitboxes have also been enlarged to help you select and order them around better. Colonists will now flee from combat by default to save themselves and will retaliate only as a last resort. They will no longer attempt to defeat a sandworm in hand-to-hand combat. Be sure to have guards and specialists around to deal with hostiles, as you’ll be relying on them more than before. Colony alarm happiness penalty has also been drastically reduced so you can call people to safety and increase guard aggression range without a major hit to morale.
Isolated working area
On more peaceful news, colonists will now attempt to automatically move close to their place of work if there’s capacity available, but will never kick current tenants out. When you load up a large colony for the first time, this process might take awhile. This aims to allow players to create specialized production areas further away from the main colony and speed up production.
Other notable changes include storage, which now dump out all resources marked as “blocked”. Previously this only prevented bringing in new items of that type. Incorrect processing cycles in scavenge buildings such as Scrapper and Lumber Yard have been fixed, and workers will now refine the collected resources inside the building before handing them out. Since this increases the total processing times, production output quantities have been slightly increased in several buildings. And as a small but significant change, both transformers’ area of effect has been increased.
Hope you’ll have an awesome Year of the Tiger. Post a screenshot of your Lunar Year themed colony on this thread to celebrate together and stay safe out there! And as a final teaser, the next update will have a new game mode to look forward to!
Fireworks over the colony
Changelog - “Free Update 2” - 25th of January 2022
Greetings, Survivors! It’s time for the next free update, which brings quite a few new things to the game. It’s the Year of the Tiger, and to celebrate it we’re giving you several cosmetic buildings, lights and even hats! We’ve improved the lives of your colony in a few intense ways, like colonists running away from a fight and guards being more effective. We’ve also included some quality of life updates for you as a player, like the return of the feedback button and that colonists will now try to move closer to where they are assigned to work which will lead to shorter commutes and improvements to the AI.
General
Added Lunar New Year content to the game.
Celebrate the Year of the Tiger with colorful lanterns, impressive statues and fireworks!
4 new cosmetic buildings include a colony banner stand, two statues and a fireworks launcher to light up the night.
6 cosmetic variants to decorative lights.
Other decorations have also been added as well as Lunar-themed hats for the colonists and lanterns to colony buildings to make the whole colony celebrate the lunar new year.
You can unlock some of the content by completing milestones for prestige.
Some of the content will be automatically applied when the game is loaded, such as the colonist hats and other smaller tweaks to existing buildings.
This content will be automatically turned on when the game is updated and will be turned off at a specified time.
The content can also be toggled on or off from the ingame settings in the Main Menu.
Colonists will now prefer housing buildings that are closer to their workplaces.
This should allow your colonists to spend more time working instead of running around the colony to go to sleep in their homes.
After you load your previous save, the colonists will start looking for free houses closer to their workplace, which can cause a chain reaction as they all start moving around, but this should cool down after a moment.
Improvements and fixes to the colony combat.
Colonists will now always flee from combat instead of fighting. Only Guards and Specialists will fight attacking hostiles.
The penalty from the Alarm mode has been significantly decreased.
Added a highlight to units in combat in the colony.
If a Colonist or Specialist has a target to attack, this highlight will be shown.
Enemies with a target to attack will also show this highlight.
Guard and Specialists should also now be easier to select in the colony.
Colonists working as Guards at the Gate should now be constantly working at the gate instead of working as carriers around the colony.
They should also now change to the Guard clothing just like the Guards at the Guard Post.
Fixed an issue that would cause Guards to be less effective in combat after saving and loading.
Previously any colonist that had been assigned to work as a guard would have the same values as a regular colonist after saving and loading.
Now the values are saved and loaded correctly.
Hostile animals should no longer attack open fields or Water Wells when they attack the colony.
Increased the damage the Guards and the level 1 weapons do to enemies.
Gameplay
PC Only: Added back the possibility to write feedback of the game to the developers.
In the Pause Menu, there is now a button Write Feedback. This can be used to write feedback straight to the developers regarding the game.
If you encounter any game breaking bugs, please use this to immediately report the issue so that the issue can be investigated as soon as possible.
When a resource is now disallowed from a specific storage building, the building will eject all units of that resource onto the ground.
They will be spawned next to the building as a resource box the colonists can then carry to other storage buildings that allow the resource.
The resource order shown in Allowed Resources for the Campsite, Warehouse and the General Storage has been changed.
Resources should now be in a more consistent order.
The Colonists working at the Gate will remain working there even after upgrading the Gate.
Previously the extra work slots were closed after upgrading.
Fixed an issue with the Industrialist ideology that would cause two techs to overlap each other.
This issue caused the Conveyor Belts tech to overlap with the Rare Metals tech.
Changed the way how tooltips for resource deposits and work areas are shown in the colony.
The game should no longer attempt to show them if you are for example only moving past a resource deposit.
This should improve the performance of moving around the colony.
Also changed the way how panels are shown in the World Map.
The panel should only become visible if you stop at a location or sector.
This should improve performance when moving around the World Map.
Fixed an issue that would cause the game to become stuck if events were closed too quickly.
Fixed an issue that would cause the Work Area tooltip to change resources to different ones after hovering over the same resources for a while.
Fixed an issue that would cause small decorations to switch their location if they were rotated when placing.
This should make placing decorations such as the Small Bush a lot easier.
Fixed an issue that would cause the Trade button to move in the Society window based on the length of the description of the other society.
The button should now remain still.
The work area resource tooltip should no longer overlap with the repair mode tooltip.
The Specialist Menu tooltip now shows the prompts on how to select and focus the camera on the specialist.
Fixed an issue that would cause the extra panels shown for specific buildings (such as the recipe selection panel) to not close when the cross icon at the top right corner was pressed.
Fixed an issue that would cause the achievement “Look, No Hands” to not complete if the Metal Extractor had been upgraded to the Magnetic Separator.
Fixed an issue that would cause green highlights to remain visible constantly for multiple buildings around the colony.
Changed the way how buildings which require colonists to gather resources work.
Previously the colonists would only drop some resources to the building and not actually work at the building at all.
Now the colonists will work at the building as well, though their work cycle is a lot shorter than other buildings.
This change affects buildings such as the Scrapper and the Recycler.
These buildings will now produce slightly more resources due to the work taking a bit more time.
The colonists will now take resources inside production buildings instead of dropping them off at the corner of the building.
Fixed the description of the Motorization tech.
Previously it would mention that it unlocks the Oil Refinery as well.
Fixed an issue that would cause a combat event at the gate to result in combat instead of avoiding it despite the text indicating that you have avoided combat.
Graphics
Updated some of the icons of the Build Menu categories.
Tweaked the visual look and animations of the following buildings:
The Insect Farm.
The Sawmill.
The Logging Camp.
The Lumber Yard.
Widened the panel shown when a trade needs to be confirmed.
This should now allow texts and resources to fit better.
Added a resource box for Medicinal Herb.
Previously the colonists would be carrying an invisible box to the storage when Medicinal Herb was being produced.
Fixed an issue with the icicles shown on the Botanical Garden.
Balance Adjustments
Updated the resources the society Coalition offers to be more consistent.
Slightly increased the work area of the Radiator and its upgrade.
Increased the work area of the Transformer and its upgrade.
Dev Diary - Free Update #1
Happy wintery greetings, survivors
We’re back at work in snowy Finland and ramping up development for a fresh new year! The first of the free updates in 2022 includes a dedicated repair and demolish button to make those tasks faster without a need to select each building individually. Victories in gate combat are now rewarded with loot left behind by the defeated bandits.
Something that has been requested a lot is restoring rare metal production to the colony via a new late-game tech. It allows you to upgrade the Metal Auto-Extractor into a Magnetic Separator with production options for regular or rare metal production. We’ve also updated over a dozen building models to be more distinctive and easier to recognize in your colony.
A new “Very Hard” difficulty option has been added for those looking to really challenge themselves. It starts you in a very barren climate with limited resources, reduced water and energy production outputs and also increases the amount and severity of catastrophes. Balancing the game’s overall difficulty continues in the meanwhile and we’ll share more news on that later on.
Smaller features and updates include balance fixes such as more aggressive guard and specialist AI with better target prioritization especially during an alarm, limitations to fishing building placement, removal of bandits that attack you from behind and so on. Once the alarm is enabled, guards and specialists search for hostile targets in a much wider area than before and engage them more aggressively.
Along with lots of bugs we’ve also fixed the Twitch integration, so you’ll be able to vote on event and quest results, and which catastrophe your favorite streamer will face next! Check the detailed bug fix list in the patch notes. Notable balance changes include reduced silver gains from selling weapons, faster but more resource-consuming meal production and increased metal/concrete deposits around the colony.
We'll be revealing more about the future updates later on, but they include a new, customizable game mode and scenarios for more replayability with all-new challenges. And as always, updates will have more new content, bug fixes, balancing and QoL improvements.
And that is it! We’ll be releasing more free updates and DLC throughout the year and are excited to share all about them as soon as possible! In the meanwhile, stay safe and play some games!
